Actually, after the recent Google Penguin update you might want to think about using more 'Click Heres' than you did before...
Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#52Bad advice, in my experience.
Anecdotally, I did a website recently for a carpet cleaner. Standard wordpress job with his services and things. At the top of the home page, he wanted a link to a form for redeeming living social coupons, which, not wanting to say "Click Here for", I just made as "Reedem Living Social Coupon".
It turned out after a couple weeks that many of his users were not clicking "Reedem Living Social Coupon", but clicking the "Contact Us" link. As a quick fix, I renamed the link to "Click Here to Redeem Living Social Coupon" and bolded the text. He mentioned a week later that this had a noticeable improvement in people clicking the correct form.
People who use the web for scheduling carpet cleanings are not always the same as the twitter crowd. You need to remember who your audience is, not what all your programmer friends prefer.
(And for some closure, I ended up adding a "coupon code" optional entry on the generic contact form for people who still clicked the wrong one anyway.)
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#53I've tried to abide by this rule for most of the 17 years I've done web development. There is, however, an exception to this rule: My mom. My mom (and my dad) belong to the group that - even after a decade of daily computer use - frequently fail to recognize distinct interface elements. They seem to have no general concept of the look / purpose of a link, a window, a modal box etc. Colors and chrome are meaningless t…
"My mom (and my dad) belong to the group" As a matter of fact I spoke to your parents the other day. They asked me if there was a space between the first and second word of my domain name. They also didn't understand that you can't just send an email to domainname you need an address at domainname . They didn't know what a browser bar was they just type my domain name in google and go from there. In all seriousness y…
I think in general, if you are targeting the "general public" or an audience you know is probably not tech-savvy, you're better off with links that say "Click Here" or actually using buttons.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#54Bad advice, in my experience. Anecdotally, I did a website recently for a carpet cleaner. Standard wordpress job with his services and things. At the top of the home page, he wanted a link to a form for redeeming living social coupons, which, not wanting to say "Click Here for", I just made as "Reedem Living Social Coupon". It turned out after a couple weeks that many of his users were not clicking "Reedem Living Soc…
Is it? It's tough to say whether the wording was the problem in your case without seeing the site though. Was the link visibly clickable? Was it a button? What would happen if it was a button and it had a Living Social logo on it? Bold text calling out to click sounds more visible and enticing, but there are other ways to grab users' attention.
Yes, you can print an A3 sized sign to remind visitors to flush the toilet, bolding, italicizing and underlining the text to get their attention. Or you can make a clever doodle or an icon, and make it fit into the bathroom's interior design.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#55I agree with almost everything in this post, philosophically and intellectually. However, any usability study I remember seeing on this subject has always concluded that "click here" converts better. So until they back up any of their suggestions with data, this article gets relegated to pure brain fodder. Edit: And I'm sure conversions would probably also depend on the demographics of your user base, so I'd be inter…
How do we change these behaviors if we don't lead users to it as an industry? Do you want to make the web a better place or just raise your conversion rate? I don't know if there is a "right" answer.
It is hubris to think that your users should change for you. Usability is about adapting computers to fit humans not changing humans to fit someone's definition of "right".
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#56I've tried to abide by this rule for most of the 17 years I've done web development. There is, however, an exception to this rule: My mom. My mom (and my dad) belong to the group that - even after a decade of daily computer use - frequently fail to recognize distinct interface elements. They seem to have no general concept of the look / purpose of a link, a window, a modal box etc. Colors and chrome are meaningless t…
I wonder how your parents would fare if you were to give them a tablet? "Click here? how do I plug the mouse in?"
Sigh. Reminds me of my (late) mother, who would accidentally click on the "Subject" header in Outlook (causing messages to be sorted by subject) and have no idea what happened or why messages were no longer sorted in the order they arrived.
She would call me saying her email "looks all different" for "no reason"
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here just to say this. UI is a learned behavior and if you're a beginner any explicit sign or help indicating what to do next is very much welcomed.
... and if you're a beginner any explicit sign or help indicating what to do next is very much welcomed. What's interesting is the the OP's parents have been using computers for a decade. They're not beginners per se, but they seem (I'm guessing) to have internalized some UI artifacts from the Web of 10 years ago. If this is the case then the problem is not helping people who are beginners, but helping people who hav…
Neither of my parents (both college-educated with multiple graduate degrees) ever really "got" GUIs or the web. They learned computing with punch cards and later with teletypes and vt100 terminals. They were fine with DOS when PCs came on the scene, but just never really made the leap to graphical interfaces and the web. My dad in particular thought it was all a bunch of silliness and it actually contributed to his loss of interest in computing (he used to program Z80s in assembly to control laboratory equipment. He could also progam TI 980 minicomputers by toggling machine code in on the front panel. But he never saw the point of the web.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#58This is wrong advice If you are trying to get more people to click. My experience from having Done more banner than I care to remember is that it increases click rate .
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#59Bad advice, in my experience. Anecdotally, I did a website recently for a carpet cleaner. Standard wordpress job with his services and things. At the top of the home page, he wanted a link to a form for redeeming living social coupons, which, not wanting to say "Click Here for", I just made as "Reedem Living Social Coupon". It turned out after a couple weeks that many of his users were not clicking "Reedem Living Soc…
My cofounder has had similar experiences. I don't have the data handy, but last time I grumbled about a "click here" he told me about a couple of times he A/B tested it and got substantial wins.
I still wouldn't use "click here" in normal writing (e.g., a blog post); I think it's unnecessary and a bit gauche. But I'm happy to do it on landing pages and other places where I really do want people to click there.
Re: Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we change these behaviors if we don't lead users to it as an industry? Do you want to make the web a better place or just raise your conversion rate? I don't know if there is a "right" answer.
I think its pretty arbitrary to claim that "changing these behaviors" would "make the web a better place". I think if people think and react in a certain way, there is nothing wrong with that, and web design should evolve around how people act as opposed to the other way around. Then again I don't work in either any sort of UX or web development, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut here :)
The entire point of UX is "how can we change the interface to adapt to the user", so I'm not sure the GP's point stands.